For years the National Security Agency has been violating
restrictions and misusing the US domestic spying program that collected
private data from US citizens, newly released declassified documents
show.
The new information from Intelligence Community Documents
Regarding Collection under Section 501 of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) shows that the government on
a daily basis spied on Americans’ telephone numbers, calling
patterns as well as users IP addresses during the surveillance of
foreign terror suspects.

The documents show that between 2006 and 2009 the
NSA violated the court restrictions by spying on telephone calls
and lying to judges about how the data was deployed. The spying
agency crossed referenced a selected list of some 16,000 phone
numbers against databases which contained millions of records,
thus violating the law, two senior intelligence officials told
Bloomberg.

The metadata program which started in 2006 enabled the NSA to
gather more information about a specific number that the agency
claimed could be linked to terrorist activity. The agency also
kept an alert list that was cross-referenced with new numbers to
consider whether they should be added to a list of "reasonable
articulable suspicion."

The NSA gathered the bulk phone records under Section 215 of the
USA Patriot Act, which requires private companies to turn over
evidence that is relevant to a terrorism investigation. However,
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the NSA
must have “reasonable, articulable suspicion” to run that
number against a larger database. Only about 2,000 numbers on the
list in 2009 met that legal condition, according to sources.

The released documents according to Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper relate to “compliance incidents
that were discovered by the NSA, reported to the FISC and the
Congress, and resolved four years ago.”
According to the documents, the US District Judge Reggie Walton
who oversaw a secret US spy court wrote he was "deeply
troubled" in March 2009 after discovering government
officials had been accessing domestic phone records without
“articulable suspicion.”

AFP Photo

In some cases the NSA was distributing the sensitive phone
records by email to as many as 189 analysts, while only 53 were
approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to see
them, a Justice Department lawyer reported later in 2009.

The NSA notified the court of the violations only in January
2009, the documents show. In turn, the court asked the spying
agency to seek approval for each case before running the query on
an individual number. In September 2009 these procedures were
revised and the court allowed the surveillance program to remain.
"Upon discovery of these incidents, which were promptly
reported to the FISC, the Court, in 2009, issued an order
requiring the NSA to seek court approval to query the telephony
metadata on a case-by-case basis, except when necessary to
protect against an imminent threat to human life," Director
of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement.

Clapper also stated that the NSA was not trying to lie or mislead
the court and that the problem with reporting the incidents was
in a “lack of a shared understanding among various NSA
components about how certain aspects of the complex architecture
supporting the program functioned.” These gaps in
understanding led to “unintentional misrepresentations in the
way the collection was described to the FISC.”

The magnitude of the metadata collection program was first
revealed in June by Edward Snowden, when he leaked documents from
Verizon Communications Inc. which showed that the company shared
its data with the NSA. In August, the Obama administration
acknowledged the phone metadata program.

Tuesday’s disclosures were released in response to a court case
in which the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation
sued the Justice Department in 2011 for records of data
collection under the USA Patriot Act.

"The documents released today are a testament to the
Government's strong commitment to detecting, correcting, and
reporting mistakes that occur in implementing technologically
complex intelligence collection activities, and to continually
improving its oversight and compliance processes,” Clapper
said.

Quotes

"There is beauty in truth, even if it's painful. Those who lie, twist life so that it looks tasty to the lazy, brilliant to the ignorant, and powerful to the weak. But lies only strengthen our defects. They don't teach us anything, help anything, fix anything or cure anything. Nor do they develop one's character, one's mind, one's heart or one's soul." Jose Harris

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